HBO was founded by a cable operator, Charles Dolan, who came up with its iconic tagline, "It's not television. It's HBO." With the launch of HBO Go for broadband and mobile to its pay TV customers, it added "It's not any streaming service. It's HBO Go" and "It's HBO. Anywhere" to its marketing toolkit.

It's been 42 years since HBO created Pay TV as a business and changed the distribution model for content worth paying for. Now it's forsaking television altogether by offering HBO Go to anyone who wants to sign up—and not just as a free add-on to subscribers of its premium TV offering.

It's an announcement that's sure to make waves with the stakeholders who brought it to the dance—cable and satellite TV operators—as the premium programmer abandons them at that dance in response to the threat of Netflix.Continue reading...

Kia has forged a reality-show sponsorship with Univision as a way of tapping into its fast-growing appeal to Hispanic consumers and as the latest initiative in its efforts to become a brand known more for fun than for fuel economy.

The partnership is around the beauty pageant show Nuestra Belleza Latina, of which Kia will become the official automotive partner. Among many tie-ins on the air, online and everywhere else will be the season's winner receiving a 2014 Forte compact sedan.

It's the biggest product integration and promotion that Kia has done with Univision, Michael Sprague, Kia's executive vice president of marketing, toldMarketing Daily. Hispanics now account for more than 9 percent of all Kia buyers in the U.S., and that number is growing. Kia's efforts to reach out to this market also include activations around high-profile soccer matches.Continue reading...

DC Comics has grown up. Now just one of the three publishing legs that make up the foundation of DC Entertainment, the comic-book publisher unleashed a new logo and brand identity this week, according to Fast Company.

The logo will start appearing on DC books in March as well as on its other publishing entities: Vertigo and Mad Magazine. The company also is involved with a slew of entertainment ventures, covering movies, TV shows, video games, DVDs, and merchandising.

“It wasn’t as obvious to the rest of the world as it was to the comic fans that Batman is from DC Comics or Sandman is a Vertigo character,” says John Rood, DC Entertainment’s executive vice president of sales, marketing, and business development, to Fast Company. “Now that our audience has exploded beyond just a readership, we needed a way of making a more consistent connection between our properties and their parent brands.”Continue reading...